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Bezdomny · 12 min read · SEASON 3
Nevada, USA
"In the desert, you can remember your name 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain"
- A horse with no name, America
I was given several playa names during my two-week stint at Burning Man 2025, none of them stuck, yet I can still recall a few. A playa name is like your codename, your handle, your nick for the duration of the Burn, and in some rare cases, throughout the entire year. It’s a way both to be recognized and forgotten, like the playa itself. Some burners actually give themselves playa names, however that is apparently frowned upon amongst the faithful.
“Maybe you won’t get your playa name on your first burn”, I was told, “but when you hear it you will know.”
There’s lots of rules on the playa, though very few of the useful ones are written down. Mainly there are customs which must be learned in-situ – like the custom of being named.
I didn’t know any of these customs before I arrived, I only had some random pieces of advice from people who had been before. Things like “accept everything you are offered, even drugs”, or “If a mutant vehicle offers you a ride, don’t think about it, just jump in”, and perhaps the most important, “If anyone is getting on your nerves, just say ‘have a nice burn’ and stroll off.”
There is a learning curve at Burning Man and everyone you meet has advice to give to the virgin burners, virgins like myself. In the end I just treated BM like a game and set off in search of challenges, tasks, and new names.
P.S.
The dry desert air makes the dearth of bathing facilities bearable, however after the first three days, I really wanted a shower. I bathed in a number of ways at BM, including once being powerwashed butt naked on the Playa by someone called Uncle John. On the Playa you can find whatever you need to survive, you just need to look around and ask. I got on my bike and rode around the playa looking for food, coffee, or a shower. I eventually found all three in the same place where I also found my first playa name: PS.
It was sauna camp, or more of a sweatlodge actually, while riding back aimlessly from a sunrise DJ set near the trash fence. It would take me several days for me to find this camp again, but for my first schvitz it was just what I needed, actually better than a shower as it got all the playa dust out of my pores. The camp that constructed it was called 88, and coincidentally they were also offering homemade granola and cold brew coffee. I made a b-line for the sweatlodge which was shaped like a hexayurt, got naked, and sat myself close to the wood stove to allow the filth to dribble off my skin gracefully.
My sweating companions were from many places, but the most boisterous of the bunch were three Armenian brothers and their Israeli buddy Jonathan who gave me the name Pleasant Shvantz, my very first playa name, or just P.S. for short.
I was meant to live in a shiftpod, located somewhere in the Yellow Bikes camp but the unprecedented weather phenomena caused me, like countless others, to postpone its erection.
Many pods, yurts, and tents got blown away, which led to the sudden renaming of Burning Man 2025 to Rebuild Man; which led me, for the entire first week, to sleep in a converted Ford cargo van. The van was cozy during the chilly desert nights but became a literal kiln as soon as the sun had risen.
A wise man
One of the advantages of waking up early at Yellow Bikes is that you get to either shoo away or accept to help the burners who somehow got it into their heads that Yellowbikes is there to fix their bikes (Yellow Bikes only fixes Yellow Bikes). One morning, two wealthy young Persians from L.A. showed up and roused me from my hammock. Their relentless insistence put me in in the mood for shooing.
Their story went like this: They ordered some eBikes to be delivered to their Plug N Play camp at a cost of $10,000, but due to several extreme circumstances involving the rain, 20 hours wait times at the gate, and sandstorms, the bikes were never delivered. They asked if they could buy some Yellow bikes from me, for “cash money” to which I replied, with a certain amount of Sovietesque pride, that “Yellow bikes cannot be purchased”, they are community bikes and anyway, there were none available on site; they were all out on the playa already, where people would pick them up and leave them as they needed them. They cannot be locked or stored out of sight.
The Persians persisted, rummaging through the junk pile of reject bikes that had been returned to our camp, whereas I returned to my hammock. Eventually they found two bikes that were somewhat rideable with warped rims, sand in the bearings, and bent handlebars. Before leaving they asked me, a wise old man of 48 dressed solely in a stolen japanese hotel bathrobe and sleeping bareass in dusty hammock slung between a semi-trailer and a lampost, what advice I had to give to two young entrepreneurs just starting out in life (albeit it with huge sums of inherited wealth). I said to value your friends more than anything, especially the friends who will stand by you in hard times, though I doubted two individuals such as these could ever fathom what “hard times” entailed. In gratitude they stuffed my robe full of treats that I had never even heard of. Molly gummies and mushroom DMT chocolates, to be taken together in large quantities, preferably with cocaine and magical company. Off they wobbled and squeaked into the distance on their dilapidated yellow bikes, never to be seen again, as happens with most of the people staying in the turnkey camps. They had only come for the selfies I suppose.
Two Shirts
The night before The Burn, meaning the night before the giant wooden effigy of a man is incinerated, LSD was distributed widely and a night of riotous laughter ensued. Being a quasi-employee of Yellow Bikes came with certain privileges. Privileges like being supplied with a staff vehicle, a van to be precise, a van with a name of course, and that name was Gay Labor. Vehicles aren’t permitted on the Playa, except for staff vehicles like Gay Labor or Big Red. Everyone jumped into Gay Labor and we took off to explore the Playa under the best possible conditions. There were an estimated total of 492 individual art projects placed throughout the playa, the basic burners I spoke with only saw a handful of these installations as they were limited by how far they could travel on foot or by bike, whereas Gay Labor allowed us to visit about half of the installations in just one night, a night where the van felt like a cosmic merry-go-round and we were staring out the windows as bemused children, often stopping to explore, examine, and climb on all manner of structure. The Playa can also be a playground for children of all ages.
The evening continued and the temperature dropped to near freezing. There was a brass band (also staff members) that hailed us to join their vehicular procession as they went around serenading various places throughout the night, ending at the giant wind chime out in Deep Playa. The band played on, the temperature dropped, people were dancing, people were sweating. Even though I was a virgin, I have spent nights in the desert before, in the Sahara to be exact, and I know how cold it gets when the sun sets. The extremes in temperature did not catch me off guard but many of the staff members, who were on their 10th or 15th burn, were literally shivering from the cold. I proceeded to clad the frozen denizens of the playa with Tshirts that I had brought along for the night, which I was later told, saved more than one person from the unprecedented cold. I can’t be sure but I think it was Redbeard that said my playa name for that night became “Two Shirts”.
The Playa requires people to work together to survive, being a loner in the desert is very hard work. The environment forces you to collaborate, and when people work together quite impressive things can happen. BM is not a festival, it’s a city. Roughly 80,000 people descend on the Playa to build a temporary city which will vanish in a week’s time. The inhospitability of the environment causes douchebags to self-exclude themselves from the festivities, BM is the opposite of the default world, it’s the extreme opposite of everything you know. I would go so far as to say that BM is the opposite of war.
Koji
Coming to Burning Man from Europe is no easy task. It can be extremely expensive because you can only carry so much survival gear on the plane, whereas the majority of Americans are getting there by ground transport with ample storage capacity so it’s much easier and cheaper for them to bring everything they need, often by flatbed.
I was coming from Paris and to get to San Francisco there are direct flights. But you know where else there are direct flights to? Tokyo, so why not fly to the US via Japan and circumnavigate the globe while going to Burning Man? The price was the same.
In Japan I managed to find a Koji Museum and bought the only souvenir I would get from that country, artisanal koji from Yamato Koji Park. Well, that and the hotel bathrobe which would be my only costume on the playa.
Meeting other fermentals on the playa and telling my story of arriving with a toothbrush, a bathrobe and some koji inevitably led Sidewinder, a woman I met, to label me Koji. “Koji, that is your playa name!” Another name that didn’t stick for very long. Sidewinder makes her own cheese and was heading to a cheese festival in Piedmonte after the Burn. I tried to connect her with friends I have in that region of Italy but with no phone reception I wasn’t able to get her details and yet another momentary connection passed into the void of time.
A big lesson from BM is about immediacy. The moments that pass there will never come again, you cannot wait for the right moment to arise; the moments are all around you at BM and you just have to meet them head on or lose them to posterity, you can only live in the moment at BM.
Scarecrow
​It might have been the mushrooms, but there was a guy who looked like a scarecrow at Collexodus, and he was making me laugh uncontrollably. It was the end of BM and we were waving at the people leaving the Playa and asking for donations, these non-perishable donations are normally used as supplies for the next year's DPW crew. People leaving the playa are often looking to get rid of drugs as well and Scarecrow handed me a fistful of mushrooms at the end of our Collexodus shift, about 1:00 AM. Following the advice I was given, I took them without thinking and on the ride back to Yellow Bikes camp I could not stop laughing as Gay Labor navigated the diminishing city.
The rest of the crew was tired and going to sleep, someone loaded me up with water and pointed me in the direction of Deep Play and said “Go!”. With an enormous smile I trudged out into the desert while someone shouted from behind:
“Be careful, there’s a murderer out there somewhere.”
By this point about half of the city had been dismantled but a few mutant vehicles were still on the Playa pumping out beats, vehicles like Mayan Warrior and Robot Heart. Their lasers were visible from kilometers away. An ornithologist I had met in the sauna said that these lasers confuse migratory birds which mistake the light for the moon and fly in circles until they fall from the sky, dead from exhaustion. “Can’t do much about it, it’s part of the cycle of life”, she said placidly. Like the dizzy birds I was circling the lasers aimlessly and the sky took on a geometry that looked both like a sea and a checkered blanket, I had no sense of direction nor time. I can’t say how long I was flying that route but I got the meaning of the annual BM migration and why so many return year after year; maybe it’s just the default world that is flying in circles and the burners that are actually getting somewhere.
Image 1: "Celestial" by Micheal Benisty
Image 2: "Skyladder" by Franziska Agrawal and Transitionzone Collective
All Images were painted on the basis of the photographs of Duncan Rawlinson
